Sri Lankan coverup of WikiLeaks war crime revelations

[Joanne98]

The Sri Lankan political and media establishment has reacted to WikiLeaks revelations, which confirm that the government was responsible for war crimes by suppressing the contents of the leaked US diplomatic cables and defending the military’s actions.

Two American cables were particularly damning. The first sent by the US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Patricia Butenis, last January stated that the issue of war crimes was “complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leaders, including President Rajapakse and his brothers and opposition candidate General Fonseka”.

An earlier cable, sent in October 2006 by then US ambassador Robert Blake, detailed the involvement of the government and the military with paramilitary groups that carried out hundreds of abductions and murders, including of politicians and journalists. Increasingly strapped for cash after restarting the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Rajapakse government turned a blind eye to the criminal activities, such as prostitution and extortion, used by the paramilitaries to finance themselves.

The release of these cables has been greeted by a combination of studied silence and outright defence of the Rajapakse government. Apart from one or two Tamil newspapers, the Colombo media has not published the full text of the Butenis cable. The Blake cable, which exposes two of the paramilitaries that form part of Rajapakse’s coalition, has not even been published in part.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/srwi-j20.shtml

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[bemildred]

2. A classic little "dirty war" it was.

LTTE was nobody to applaud when it came to good behavior either, but Rajapakse would be in good company with Henry Kissinger.